Floor Speakers 2-way or 3-way ????

[bcexpedition]

I am in the market for a pair of floor speakers and am a bit of a rookie when it comes to this. First thing I wanted to know is should I get 2-way or 3-way floor speakers? The speakers are my first step towards building a Home Theatre sound system. I have an older Dolby ProLogic receiver that works for now and my very old floor speakers have crapped out on me. I thought I would add new floor speakers now (so I can at least listen to something) and then a receiver and powered sub later. There are so many speakers to choose from so I am going to take everyones advice on this forum and go out and start listening to some. But I can not figure out if I should be leaning towards 2-way or 3-way speakers. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Darren

[This Guy]

whats your budget and room size?-nt

[Mash]

The more complicated the speaker, the more opportunities the designer has to mess something up.

Still, your best bet is to develop your live reference, and then search for speakers that satisfy your live reference. This approach will give you your longest-lasting satisfaction.

You will likely want a powered woofer/subwoofer in your HT setup and many of these are designed to cross in at 80 Hz, so your main speaker needs to go not much lower than 55 Hz.

I favor the Magnepans, and the $500 2-way MMG will reach an honest 50 Hz so you can see that you have many candidates. I use a pair of MMG's for HT with powered CSW woofers, and I plan to move in one of my Velodyne Servo-15's. So your choices are wide-open.

[poneal]

Two way speakers are usually easier to drive. I have two way speakers and am happy witht them. To confuse you a little more, there are even 2 and 1/2 way speakers out there. The best thing to do is to take some cds that you listen to frequently and test the speakers. If they let you, take the speakers home and test them for awhile. Return them if you dont like them for something else. hope this helps.

[Woochifer]

First thing you should do is establish your budget and fan out from there. Don't rule out standmounts just yet. When I started piecing together my speaker setup a couple of years ago, I also initially favored floorstanders. But, once I got started with auditions, I noticed that most of the sub-$1,000 floorstanders out there had significant problems with box resonance and much more uneven tonal characteristics compared to standmounted speakers. The only thing you really lose with standmounts is the deep bass response, and that can be easily fixed with a subwoofer.

Since you plan to eventually build a home theatre system around what you buy right now, it's important to get something that you can grow into. When doing your evaluations, make sure that you also give a listen to the center and surround speakers that go with the mains, and make sure that they are a good match for one another.

As for the answer to your original question, in general you'll get a more even overall tonal response with two-way (or 2 1/2 way) speakers. But, that's a severe generality, and you should go more by the sound quality than the arcanery of design philosophy.